Members of two prominent student groups who took part in a violent protest against a pro-Israel event at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) are attempting to justify their actions, following intense backlash and calls for legal action against them.

UCI’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) each released separate statements defending their sponsorship of and participation in the demonstration against a Student’s Supporting Israel (SSI) event featuring Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans and the screening of a movie about the army.

As The Algemeiner reported, anti-Israel students at UCI blockaded attendees. One female student was harassed and chased, to the point that she was forced to flee and take refuge inside a nearby building. Police were eventually called in, but allowed the protest to continue. Protesters shouted ,“Long live the intifada,” “f*** the police,” “displacing people since ‘48/ there’s nothing here to celebrate” and “all white people need to die.”

SJP said they were “wholly justified” in protesting the SSI event, because “the presence of the IDF, better known as Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), and police threatened our coalition of Arab, Jewish, Black, Latinx, API, undocumented, trans, and queer students and the greater activist community. Our demonstration was held to protest the presence of military and police forces on campus, which threaten the lives of Black and Brown people every day.”

Some men don’t just want dogs to be their best friend — they want to be the dog. Pup play, where grown men dress up as dogs and act that way in public, is both silly and disturbing, and shines a light on some of the confusion and pain inside the gay community.

Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary, “The Secret Life of Human Pups,” on Wednesday night. The Guardian carried out interviews with three of the show’s main characters, showing how they got involved in the movement: the struggles they face and the fun they enjoy.

The pup-play movement “grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach out to likeminded people,” The Guardian’s Nell Frizzell explained. “Human pups tend to be male, gay, have an interest in dressing in leather, wear dog-like hoods, enjoy tactile interactions like stomach rubbing or ear tickling, play with toys, eat out of bowls and are often in a relationship with their human ‘handlers.’”

Tom, who goes by “Spot” and works as an engineer in a theater, said pup play gives him license to behave in a way that feels natural, even primal. “You’re not worrying about money, or food, or work,” he told Frizzell. “It’s just the chance to enjoy each other’s company on a very simple level.”

But Tom’s introduction to the world was far from simple. “He knew he liked sleeping in a collar, had a fetish for skin-tight clothing - Lycra, rubber, even off-the-peg cycling shorts - then came a dalmatian zentai suit he found on eBay … and eventually, a man in a club walked up to him and said: ‘Oh right, so you’re a pup.’” In order to enjoy this simple company with other pups, he broke up with his former fiancee Rachel and moved into a gay relationship with his handler, Colin.

“It’s a sad thing to say, but there’s not love from the heart in me for Colin,” Tom admitted. “But what I have got is someone who is there for me and I’m happy with that.” He needs Colin because “a puppy without a collar is a stray; they don’t have anyone to look after them.”

Men det etablerede giver sig ikke uden kamp. For den er magten blevet sit eget indhold og den den ser ud til at ville ofre alt, selv befolkningen, for en forlængelse. “The President of the unelected executive arm of the European Union (EU) has vowed to block all right wing populists from power across the continent, shortly after acquiring the power to exert “far-reaching sanctions” on elected governments.” hedder det på Breitbart

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, promised to exclude Norbert Hofer, the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), from all EU decision-making if elected ahead of yesterday’s presidential vote.

“There will be no debate or dialogue with the far-right,” the liberal bureaucrat told AFP.

The FPÖ has been Austria’s top-polling political force for some time. However, after leading the pack for most of the presidential race, the right-wing candidate lost out by 0.6 per cent to the Green party, after the inclusion of postal votes, and months of Europe’s mainstream media calling the centre-right populist “far right”.

With the continent-wide democratic surge to the right, the anti-democratic Commission could be in for a challenge in their attempt to exclude each and every elected government they deem to be “far right.”

However, as of 2014, the Commission was handed a batch of new powers that it could plausibly use to do just this – powers already being mobilised against Poland’s elected, conservative leaders.

The Commission can now trigger a “rule of law mechanism” (Article 7 TEU) againstnations it perceives as deviating from “the common constitutional traditions of all Member States.” Ultimately, “far-reaching sanctions” can be exerted, and a country can be stripped of all voting rights in the EU and have funding blocked.

The election victory of Alexander Van der Bellen, former head of the Austrian Green party, against Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) candidate Norbert Hofer, saw one of the tightest results in Austrian electoral history.

The former Green leader won the vote by a mere 0.6 per cent after postal ballots had been counted. Some are sceptical of the results and one case in particular has given pause.

The town of Waidhofen an der Ybbs has, on the Austrian Interior Ministry website, a stunning result: 146.9 per cent of the town voted, Sternreports.

According to the Interior Ministry website a total of 13,262 people had voted with 12,559 of the votes cast being regarded as valid which is still estimated to be more people than actually reside in the town.

The Interior Ministry came out and claimed that the entire result was simply a technical glitch and Robert Stein, chairman of the Electoral Department of the Interior, said the problem was an input error on behalf of one of their staff.

See, for example, this story out of Florida. Or this story out of North Carolina. Or this story, wherein a convicted fraudulent voter and poll worker in Ohio was cheered at a Democrat-sponsored anti-ID rally in Ohio. Or these instances of elected Democrats being charged and convicted of illegal voting. While you’re at it, don’t forget about Rhode Island’s voter ID law, passed by a Democratic legislature and co-sponsored by black Democrats who stated that they’d personally witnessed fraud. The anti-voter ID crowd must be forced to explain just how much fraud they’re willing to accept. Double voting, non-citizens voting, dead people voting, etc. I’ll leave you with a friendly reminder that there is an overwhelming bipartisan consensus in support of these common sense laws.

“I would not deport children. I do not want to deport family members either,” Clintondeclared in March. Clinton’s pledge not to enforce U.S. immigration law as President represents an essentially unprecedented departure from the nation’s history of enforcing immigration law.

As the Washington Postreported: “Clinton’s pledge not to deport any illegal immigrants except violent criminals and terrorists represents a major break from President Obama, and it could vastly increase the number of people who would be allowed to stay in the country.”

Clinton’s vision erases entirely the protections that U.S. immigration laws are supposed to afford American citizens: such as protecting Americans from losing a job to an illegal immigrant, preventing the sapping of school and hospital resources, as well as defending the voting privileges and enfranchisement of U.S. citizens (giving citizenship to illegal immigrants allows them to cancel out the votes of native-born American citizens).

The implication of Clinton’s platform– i.e. that illegal entry is not in and of itself a deportable offense–represents a central pillar of the open borders credo: namely, that millions of people can illegally come to the country, take jobs, attend U.S. schools, receive affirmative action, apply for federal benefits, and give birth to children who receive birthright citizenship.

Moreover, waiting until after a violent conviction has been obtained to deport an illegal alien means that immigration laws were enforced far too late–i.e. they were not enforced until after an American was victimized, raped, or murdered by a criminal alien. A federal policy that waits to enforce immigration laws until after there is a criminal conviction would mean admitting and releasing criminals by the hundreds of thousands, and letting them roam free until after they have committed a crime, and have been apprehended, tried, and convicted for that crime.

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other “leaders” that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.

The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law-enforcement policies. Public-housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public-housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals.

Obama is the divisive excuse maker, as his comments to graduates of Howard University showcased:

“Be confident in your blackness” Obama said in the speech, adding, “That’s a pet peeve of mine, people who’ve been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky, that God may have blessed them. It wasn’t nothing you did.”

I have major issues in Obama’s comments, surely to be overlooked by black liberals, the media, and white Leftist enablers.

To begin, what would the media and other leftists say if George Bush told graduates to “be confident in your whiteness”? I will allow you to ponder that; as for me, no further explanation needed.

In his commencement speech, Obama may have felt the need to remind blacks to be confident, because liberals like reminding blacks that we are less than everybody else. Blacks are taught terms like “institutional racism,” “white privilege,” and many other concepts that essentially say to young blacks that the deck is stacked against them. Black liberals have built-in excuses for failure. The irony of institutional racism is that almost all of the institutional racism originates from bastions of the left; in education, entertainment, and unions, to name a few.

But the next part of the Obama message was most perplexing: “it wasn’t nothing you did” to be successful in life, it was luck.

It seems that Obama is saying that your success is not because of you, your hard work, tenacity, determination, drive, focus, and the many other attributes needed for success. Obama implied that the Howard grads were just lucky.

Of course, there is an element of luck in everything, and there is a saying, “It’s always better to be lucky than good.” But it’s good to be good.

Obama provided a glimpse into this own views of his success, as he feels very lucky to be where he is. He must know that he was not prepared to be president, and that his performance has been dismal. Any credit that Obama gets as president is because of luck. The luck that the media is leftist, and therefore willing to accept failure of a black man, simply because he’s black and a Democrat. Imagine the history of Obama, if he were a white Republican and you will get the picture.

Obama is lucky that black people have not burned down Washington. Because if Obama were “lucky” enough to be a white Republican president, he would be the most despised president by blacks in modern history.

In a time where Obama and other Leftists talk of white privilege, the luckiest man on the planet is Barack Obama, lucky to be considered black, in a world that now despises white.

The news coming from Venezuela—including shortages as well as, most recently, riots over blackouts; the imposition of a two-day workweek for government employees, supposedly aimed at saving electricity; and an accelerating drive to recall the president—is dire, but also easy to dismiss as representing just one more of these recurrent episodes.

That would be a mistake. What our country is going through is monstrously unique: It’s nothing less than the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States.

The real culprit is chavismo, the ruling philosophy named for Chavez and carried forward by Maduro, and its truly breathtaking propensity for mismanagement (the government plowed state money arbitrarily into foolish investments); institutional destruction (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions); nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families).

(…)

In the midst of all this, Venezuela is facing one of the worst Zika outbreaks in South America, and it’s an epidemic the country can hardly measure, much less respond to. The Universidad Central de Venezuela’s Institute for Tropical Medicine is where the crime and public-health crises collide. The institute—ground zero in the country’s response to tropical epidemics—was burglarized a shocking 11 times in the first two months of 2016. The last two break-ins took place within 48 hours of one another, leaving the lab without a single microscope. Burglars rampaged through the lab, scattering samples of highly dangerous viruses and toxic fungal spores into the air.

Conditions like those make it virtually impossible for institute researchers to do their work, crippling the country’s response to the Zika outbreak. And attempts to repair the damage are undercut by the same dysfunctions that afflict the rest of the economy: There’s just no money to replace the expensive imported equipment criminals have stolen.

In this video Luke Rudkowski and Jeff Berwick travel down to Caracas Venezuela to give you a report on how people live in socialism. We not only give you a detailed update on life in Caracas but a complete social and economic breakdown of the situation on the ground.

In this rare episode that features a person of color, the gang ruins yet another innocent bystander’s life. Babu, a Pakistani immigrant, opens up a generic café across the street from Jerry’s apartment. Feeling it is place to give everyone advice, Jerry tells Babu to bring different cuisine to the neighborhood and make the restaurant Pakistani-themed instead. The restaurant fails, and Babu continually yells, “You are a very bad man” cartoonishly while waving his finger at Jerry. Later on in the series, Jerry accidentally gets Babu deported, and the scene is construed as comedy.

After George’s black boss is offended when he tells him he looks like Sugar Ray Leonard, George goes out of his way to prove he is not racist by trying to find a black man to pretend to be his friend. He stops random black people on the street and asks them to play his friend, finally getting an exterminator to come with him to dinner to meet his boss. Aside from being a super awkward episode, it insinuates that you can’t be racist if you can prove you have one black friend.

Eksempel 3. “The Implant,” Season 4, Episode 19, hvor “Jerry meets a buxom woman at his gym and feels compelled to find out if she has breast implants. Rather than simply ask, he enlists Elaine to spy on her in the gym, determine whether her breasts are real or fake, and report back to Jerry.” Spectacular!

The gang can’t figure out if Elaine’s new boyfriend is part black. Determined to figure out his ethnicity, Elaine asks several inadvertent questions about his heritage. After hearing hip-hop music blaring from his apartment and noticing his collection of African masks, Elaine is confident of his blackness. She even calls the black waitress “sister” and says, “It’s okay, my boyfriend is black,” at which point he arrives and tells her he is in fact white and assumed she was Hispanic because her last name is Benes. She says she is not, and they conclude, “So we’re just a couple of white people?” Seinfeld deals with the issue of interracial dating without having any of the characters date an actual person of color.

After being chased by an angry mob, Kramer shouts, “It’s like this every day in Puerto Rico!” Manuel Mirabal, the president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, called the episode an “unconscionable insult” to Puerto Ricans.

They cover Obama like it it’s a movie or book or daily soap opera script. And this is the old discussion we had about the concept of the MacGuffin in a book or a movie, the MacGuffin is what the hero wants. It could be a thing, it could be a conquest, it could be victory over another person, but whatever the hero wants is the MacGuffin. And the Democrat media, of course, is only interested in whether or not Obama gets what he wants.

So in the case of Obamacare, there was never any investigation of what Obamacare actually was from the Drive-By Media. We had to do that. And a bunch of bloggers had to do it. And a bunch of conservative think tankers. And that’s the only reason people had any idea what was in those 2,000 pages ’cause the media didn’t. The media only cared whether Obama would get it, would get it passed. That’s all that mattered.

And then on the other side you have the villains, the people trying to stop the hero from getting what he wants. And those are always the Republicans. So the coverage of any Obama story is not the substance of it and not the detail of it, and not the good or the bad; it’s whether or not Obama will get it. Whether Obama will be hurt, will Obama be helped? That’s the that’s the way the media covers everything.

So, after Benghazi, Obama concocts this story that it was an internet video that led to the protests, that led to the murders of the four Americans. The media didn’t question it. They asked, will Obama get away with this? Obama wants to blame it on the video. Will he succeed? And they began the reporting, then, was only on the efforts of Obama and Hillary to make everybody believe that it was the video. The media never once questioned it. They never once poured any doubt on it. All they did was cover it from the perspective, will Obama get away with this? Obama wants people to think that it was a video. Will he get what he wants?

Mrs. Clinton is out there doing the same thing, and the media treats her the same way. The Democrats are used to this. They’re used to the media greasing the skids. They’re used to the media not investigating the substance of what they do, and yet caller after caller here can tell us why they don’t like Mrs. Clinton. Benghazi, Libya, every substitute failure that the Drive-By Media has never reported, people know it, but Hillary’s unaware of it. She doesn’t think she’s gonna get called on it because, in her experience, she gets away with whatever because the media helps her get what she wants. That’s why she’s in for a rude awakening, I think, all over this election.

The best thing that happened to medieval England was its defeat in the hundred years war and the end of English ambitions on the continent of Europe. The best thing to happen in the 16th century was Henry VIII’s rejection of the pan-European papacy. The wisest policy of his daughter, Elizabeth I, was an isolationism so rigid that she rejected one continental suitor after another. Britain fought off all attempts by France and Spain to restore European Catholicism, and accepted a Dutch and a German monarch strictly on the basis of British parliamentary sovereignty.

Cameron’s 18th-century predecessor was Robert Walpole, author of Walpole’s Peace. Its meticulous isolation from Europe’s conflicts brought Britain a golden age of enlightenment and industrial revolution. In 1734, Walpole could proudly tell the Queen: “Madam there are 50,000 men slain this year in Europe, and not one an Englishman.”

Even William Pitt’s creation of a British empire was based on staying explicitly aloof from the seven years’ war on the continent of Europe. Later, while Horatio Nelson’s victories were essential to British interests, the Waterloo campaign could hardly, on David Cameron’s terms, have been avoided by earlier intervention. Nor did Napoleon Bonaparte pose a serious threat to Britain.

The history of EU-style multinational federations imposed by an elite from above in Europe is not a happy one. From the frayed patchworks of the Holy Roman and Hapsburg Austrian Empires, down to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, they have invariably ended in bloody chaos, and then the peace and quiet of the graveyard.

Not for nothing did a bemused Mikhail Gorbachev – and as the man who presided over the dissolution of Russia’s “evil empire” he should surely know – say that the most puzzling development in Europe over the past decade was the determination of the EU’s leaders to reconstruct the Soviet Union, a failed state if there ever was one, on the soil of western Europe.

Gorbachev was speaking before the long arm of EU meddling reached as far as Ukraine, causing that vast country to split in two and threaten war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia – a slow-burn crisis that may yet erupt once more into open conflict.

Back in the 1990s, the total failure of EU diplomacy helped speed former Yugoslavia into a brutal ethnic civil war. A fragile peace was finally imposed on those troubled lands not by the EU, but by Nato bombs and arm twisting backed by the Atlantic alliance’s military muscle.

A German defence white paper, leaked last week but supposed to be kept under wraps until after the referendum, leaves no doubt of Germany’s intention to drive through the merger of Europe’s armed forces “and embark on permanent cooperation under common structures”. Germany has begun to combine substantial elements of the Dutch forces with their own.

A centralised army is an indispensable component of the superstate to which the EU is openly committed. It would also provide an excuse for struggling economies to slash defence budgets. Few nations take defence seriously enough to spend even the 2 per cent of GDP required by Nato, a shortcoming criticised by President Obama in Germany last month. An EU army will see these nations cut back even further, cynically pretending that defences are strengthened even as forces and capabilities are merged and downsized.

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As well as depleted strength and capability, the aggregated European forces will beemasculated by a lack of political will. After Iraq and Afghanistan the West is paralysed, with governments terrified of committing ground forces to any conflict. An EU command structure, fraught with divergent and opposing policy agendas, will turn paralysis into rigor mortis. Look at the EU’s long track record of vacillation, timidity and inaction on the Balkans, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the immigration crisis and the Islamic State.

None of our enemies is going to take an EU army seriously. Its creation would undermine one of the most critical virtues of a strong and credible defence: deterring an aggressor from action they might be forced to regret.

The EU failed to prevent the migration crisis that threatens to overwhelm many European cities and the housing, welfare, health, and education services paid for by the hard work of citizens who have been allowed no say.

The EU failed to deploy effective naval forces along the North African coast to prevent illegal immigration across the Mediterranean. Such action, used to great effect by Australia, would not only have prevented the landing of countless unregulated immigrants on our shores but would also have saved thousands of lives and sent a firm message to both immigrants and traffickers.

It was self-doubt and a desire to expunge the sins of the past rather than strong and principled leadership that led Europe’s most powerful politician unilaterally to invite in migrants from the corners of the earth, to transform German cities and to assault and rape German girls. A policy that opened the doors of Europe to hundreds of thousands of economic migrants, including many young men of fighting age who abandoned their families and their countries; and closed the doors to genuine refugees.

Timorous EU countries failed to take military action against Assad’s regime in Syria when he crossed the chemical weapons ‘red line’. Action that could have ended his reign of terror and prevented the intervention of Russia and Iran that has solidified his position and exacerbated the migrant crisis.

Fearful EU members failed even to contemplate setting up protected safe havens in Syria, where millions of beleaguered people could have taken refuge without the need to move to other countries. This would have required boots on the ground but, terrified by experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, few if any EU states are prepared to countenance that. Physical danger was not their only fear; they were also afraid to act without United Nations authorization, which would have been vetoed by Russia.

Now, bullied and blackmailed by President Erdogan, the EU is now allowing visa free access to Europe for 70 million Turks and is well on the way to admitting Turkey to full EU membership. Not only will this push back the borders of the EU to Iran, Iraq and Syria, but it will also lead to yet another massive population shift in Europe, without consultation further transforming the way of life of its citizens.

The one place that Marxism has succeeded is in conquering academia in Europe and North America. Marxism-Leninism is now the dominant model of history and society being taught in Western universities and colleges. Faculties of social science and humanities disguise their Marxism under the label “postcolonialism,” anti-neoliberalism, and the quest for equality and “social justice.” And while our educational institutions laud “diversity” in gender, race, sexual preference, religion, national origin, etc., diversity in opinion, theory, and political view is nowhere to be seen. So our students hear only the Marxist view, and take it to be established truth.

Postcolonialism is the view that all ills in the world stem from Western imperialism and colonialism. The hierarchical caste system in India, that disenfranchises half the population as “untouchables,” is, according to postcolonial analysis, and invention of the British while they governed India. So too with tribes in Africa, allegedly invented by the British colonial authorities to “divide and conquer” the native African, who previously had all mixed together happily with no divisions and no conflicts. So too in Central Asia, where, thanks to Soviet colonial authorities, “formerly fluid hybridities and contextual identifications were stabilized, naturalized, and set into a particular mold that gave each group a definitive history, physiognomy, mentality, material culture, customs, language, and territory,” according to one postcolonial author. Apparently, according to the postcolonial view, history and culture in India, Africa, and Central Asia started with the arrival of outsiders in recent centuries.

“The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West” skrev Patrick Deneen i februar om resultatet af Gramscis udhuling af dannelse, uddannelse og tænkning; en venlig tomhed

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

(…) They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks.

(…)

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

(…)

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is the true end of education: the only essential knowledge is that know ourselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions.

Ancient philosophy and practice praised as an excellent form of government a res publica – a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first Res Idiotica – from the Greek word idiotes, meaning “private individual.” Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

(…)

They won’t fight against anyone, because that’s not seemly, but they won’t fight for anyone or anything either. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.

Trump has consistently disproved conventional wisdom. The old electoral truisms may not apply. Take the clichés about Hispanics. For nearly a decade we’ve been told that the Republicans needed to cultivate this “fastest growing demographic group,” as Obama warned everyone in 2012. The party wise men counseled Republicans to drop the harsh rhetoric about illegal aliens and reach out to the 9% of voters who are Hispanic and allegedly “natural conservatives.” Heeding this advice, Senate Republicans toyed for a while with “comprehensive immigration reform,” which many voters decoded as “amnesty” for lawbreakers stealing their jobs. Yet in most polls, “immigration reform” is consistently low on the list of issues that concern Hispanics.

That didn’t stop some in the party from angering much of the white working class, 36% of the electorate, just to pursue this electoral will-o-the-wisp. About a third of those voters voted Democrat in 2012, but evidence suggests that many are shifting to Trump this year. So Trump speaks to their concerns about ICE’s “catch-and-release” of felons, the hundreds of Americans murdered by illegal aliens, the quality-of-life crimes making many neighborhoods and cities unlivable. Trump promises to put a stop to “sanctuary cities” that blatantly disregard federal law and get away with it. He gets their anger at seeing protestors, like those in Irvine last week, attempting to stop their right to assemble and waving Mexican flags, or the demonstrators in Indiana Monday arming their children with F-bombs to hurl at Trump supporters.

And he especially understands how sick many Republicans and Democrats are of the snotty rhetoric from some leaders and pundits of both parties. From their tony enclaves far from the daily disorder and mayhem caused by our immigration failures, they suggest that such complaints reflect bigotry and xenophobia. So Trump promises to round up the illegals, build a wall on the border, and make Mexico pay for it. And I’ll wager that the pollster’s net doesn’t catch significant numbers of voters who sit at home and shout their approval at the television screen and will pull the lever for Trump come Election Day.

In fact, despite his hard words for illegal aliens, there is growing evidence, much of it anecdotal at this point, that significant numbers of Hispanics and blacks like Trump and may vote for him. Here in the San Joaquin Valley, ground zero for Mexican immigration, one more and more frequently runs into working-class Mexicans who admire Trump for his macho bluster and willingness to slap down politically correct gringos with their superior airs and class snobberies. It’s not just white conservatives who have grown sick and tired of the credentialed class telling them how to live and then demonizing them for disagreeing. No one knows how many Hispanics will vote for Trump, but I’ll wager it will be more than voted for Romney.

But Trump is ignorant and incoherent when it comes to policy, the critics say. Contrary to the commentators cocooned in their social and cultural enclaves, elections are not about policy. The majority of voters don’t carefully study the issues, pore over policy papers, and objectively weigh various proposals in order to arrive at the best choice. They are motivated by their “passions and interests,” as Madison understood. “Interests” are about “property,” or in our time, jobs and the economy. Years of sluggish growth, lower workforce participation, and the investor class waxing fat the whole time have angered a lot of people, including Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Trump’s tirades against free-trade-agreements and China’s currency manipulation speak to these frustrations.

The “passions” we see seething through a Trump rally are the anger at elites of both parties who for years now have talked down to the people, dismissed their legitimate concerns, and sneered at their ignorance, even as they pander to privileged minorities or appease the Democrats. They see criticism of Trump, whether intended or not, as criticism of themselves, yet another patronizing dismissal of their grievances. The backlash against political correctness that Trump has brilliantly exploited is the obvious focus of this anger at politicians who are supposed to be on their side, but who always find excuses to cede the high ground to the other side. Why else would the Senate confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General, especially after she told the Judiciary Committee that she viewed Obama’s unconstitutional amnesties as “legal”? Was it because she was eminently qualified, or because she is a black woman?

Some will dispute these assertions as misleading or false, but whether they are true or not is irrelevant. Politics is about perception. How else did a cipher like Barack Obama get elected twice? In 2008 he was perceived to be a racial healer, the smartest president ever, a “no red state, no blue state” unifier, and a brilliant orator. None of these perceptions turned out to be remotely true. The second time it was partly because 81% of voters perceived him to “care about people like me,” while only 18% felt the same about Mitt Romney, one of the most fundamentally decent and kind men ever to run for president. Trump seems to get that perceptions and passions come first, and policy can be figured out later. To a greater or lesser degree, this has pretty much been true in all presidential elections. Trump has simply discarded the decorum that camouflages the truth about political sausage-making.